Tag Archive: Grunge

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I haven’t done a real review in like four days. I’ve been slightly addicted to Galactic Civilizations II and I haven’t really done anything else (besides play in that poker tournament in Wheeling that I won $200 in last night. I’ve played in five sit and go tournaments there and I’ve cashed in six. I’m a pretty decent poker player). Here’s my promise to my readers. I will do an actual review tomorrow. Scout’s honor. Anyways, I still have to do my song of the day post for today. I was playing Rock Band with my little sister before I started to write this post (because she guilt tripped me into saying I wasn’t spending any time with her) and one of the songs that we played was “Pretend We’re Dead” by 90s all-female grunge act L7. Am I the only person who misses the riot grrrl acts of the 90s? There’s something undeniably bad-ass (and super sexy) about chicks that rock as hard as guys. That’s why I loved Hole (even though I hate Courtney Love) and especially Garbage (who have released some really good singles this year for their comeback album). I think I just have a thing for really tough women. Anyways, if you ever thought men had too much control over grunge, hopefully L7 can change your mind.

I really can not begin to comprehend the revisionist legacy that has begun to surround Pearl Jam in the last twenty years. I love Nirvana as much as the next kid that grew up in the 90s and I can see why critical consensus has solidified around them as the best of the grunge acts (even if I disagree), but I read a lot of music blogs (and a lot of comments on music blogs) for work, and it never ceases to amaze me how many people lump the absurdly talented and raw Pearl Jam with the whole post-grunge shitty bands like Creed and Nickelback. Eddie Vedder is my favorite frontman of the 90s (except for Thom Yorke I guess but he didn’t become the legend to me until the 2000s). He’s got the best baritone since Jim Morrison. The band’s guitar work is grunge meets Zeppelin. You literally can’t fucking go wrong with that. And they sang about real shit. They were an incredibly socially conscious band, and they need to stop being disrespected by people who have apparently never listened to Ten all the way through. It’s one of my top five albums of the 90s. Anyways, that rant aside, this song is on my list because of its story about homelessness and how that relates to my trip to New York. I could never get over the number of homeless people in this city and it broke my heart every damn time I saw one. What hurt even more than the simply poor homeless people though were hte obviously mentally ill people. “Even Flow” is a song about a homeless guy, and my experience seeing so much wealth and so much poverty at the same time will be one of the defining aspects of this trip.

If you want to here the May Song of the Day Playlist (which I highly recommend), you can find it here on Spotify. If you want a broader selection of tunes from 2012, you can find that playlist here.